Jodie won her 100m heat, semi-final and final on Saturday to collect her first Gold in a time of 12.03 seconds and then on the Sunday won her heat followed by a blistering 200m final in a time of 24.57 to collect her second National Title and Gold Medal in the Under 15 age group.

Three of the Club’s other talent Under 15s were also competing and Katie Caulfield came close to collecting a Bronze Medal in the High Jump with a leap of 1,61m to finish fourth.  Katie also finished ninth in the Long Jump with 5.10m.  Eloise Meakins finished eighth in the Javelin with 31.96m, whilst the rapidly improving Richard Humphries collected a 5th place in the Boys hammer competition.

In the Under 17 Championships, four of the Club’s athletes collected medals and two of them National Titles.  In the Under 17 Girls 80m hurdles the Club’s athletes threatened to run riot coming within a 100th of a second of taking all three medals.  Helen van Kempen took the National Title in 11.38 seconds, Stephanie Gaynor the Silver in 11.43 seconds and Claire Humphries fourth with 11.47 seconds with only the Exeter Harriers athlete preventing a clean sweep.  All three recorded personal best times.

In the first track event on Sunday morning, Emily Stevens returned to form in the 300m hurdles final.  Having comfortably qualified in the heats on Saturday, she returned to record a new personal best time of 44.78 seconds in the final to take the Silver Medal.

Another outstanding performance came from Nathan Wake, who had to run two 400m races on the Saturday to qualify for his final, one of the last events of the day on Sunday.  Once again he found himself competing against a number of the athletes he had mostly been beating all season, most notably Michael Warner, who had broken that sequence with a photo finish win at English Schools.  Nathan, having already reversed that result in the Schools International, was not about to allow another photo finish deprive him of a National Title.  Over the first two hundred metres he kept a careful check on the opposition and then in the final 100m he delivered the winning blow, sprinting away to record a new personal best of 48.44 seconds.  Not only did that win him a National Title, it also gave him the fastest time in the UK this year for an Under 17.

Other Under 17s competed were Danielle Currie (Triple Jump) with 10.96m for seventh place, Deborah Willis (300m) fifth in her heat with 41.86 seconds, Nina Edwards (300m) who qualified for the final finishing eighth with 41.57 seconds and Laura Wake, who qualified for the 200m final to record 24.96 in finishing 6th.

These were a series of outstanding performances from our up and coming young athletes and it was great to see them all competing at such a high standard after a very busy competitive season.  Some of them will now begin preparing for competitions in a higher age group next season, whilst others will remain in the age group for another year and we have more promising youngsters coming up.  For eight of our athletes, they have one more major competition to cope with, the UK School Games in two weeks time and I am sure we will see some more good performances from them.

Dave Rice, Senior Coach